Law Commons^™

To Stimulate, Provoke, Or Incite? Hate Speech And The First Amendment, Kenneth Lasson

All Faculty Scholarship

If protecting freedom of speech is one of mankind's noblest pursuits, then restricting it is the most difficult. Yet limit we must: even the purest civil libertarian will concede that false shouts of fire cannot be countenanced nor broadcasts of wartime troop movements; even those who object to obscenity laws recognize the need for enabling redress of libel; and even those who would protect the right to be insulting do not defend inflammatory words spit out nose-to-nose. Now a spate of "speech codes" on college campuses has once again brought the first amendment to the fore, part of a simmering …